everything RF interviewed Peter Kempf, director of sales at Becker Nachrichtentechnik. He has built up Becker's own sales team and expanded the market scope worldwide with sales now coming from all continents. Having spent a good part of his career in the semiconductor industry he is continuously pushing for innovative technical and commercial solutions to create lasting customer relationships.
With experience from a variety of operational, commercial and strategic roles in Philips, NXP, and ST, he holds a Ph.D. in Communication Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Engineering.
Q. Can you give us a brief history of Becker RF? When the company was founded and the objective behind it?
Mr. Becker, the owner of Becker Nachrichtentechnik GmbH started off as a dynamic RF engineer at one of the big measurement equipment companies. In 1996 he decided to create its own company, as a small custom development office. Step by step some proprietary products have been developed and finally, the company was incorporated as “Becker Nachrichtentechnik GmbH” in 2009.
Today Becker Nachrichtentechnik belongs to Germany´s most innovative small and medium-sized enterprises. The company is a manufacturer of devices and systems in the field of wireless communication and employs 20 people and still benefits from the “quality culture” that was inherited from the measurement equipment domain.
Q. What Products and Solutions does Becker RF develop?
Technically speaking Becker Nachrichtentechnik develops products in the frequency domain of up to 10 GHz currently. But the frequency boundary has always been a moving target and will certainly increase in the coming years. At the same time, in very specific applications, even short wave (< 30 MHz) is still an interesting topic addressed by some of our products.
From an application perspective, there is always the issue that applications are very specific but available ‘standard products’ by big companies do not perfectly fit. Under cost or volume pressure, customers look for solutions that complement the standard boxes by specific devices to achieve their goal. A good example of this is our infotainment adapter RSDU-2X4AR (we call it “RF Terminal”): it allows to connect a large number of antenna ports of car radio systems to few signal generator sources. It takes care of level calibration, signal routing/switching but also of some DC measurements in the area of phantom voltage. It is a device fully optimized for the very specific test setup needed at the end of the production line of infotainment equipment.
Q. What Market Segments do you cater to? Which is the largest segment for you?
From a market segment point of view, our products are present in the semiconductor industry, in the automobile industry, but also in security and defense applications as well as critical communication infrastructures. No market segment is dominating our turnover. We are trying to have an equilibrium as this is helping us to surf the economic cycles.
Another interesting segment is the area of research, e.g. particle accelerators, universities. This is normally not generating a very significant amount of income, but very important to keep our technology focused on the latest challenges, and it helps to drive our innovation.
We are always keen on RF challenges brought to us, which are a bit outside the norm or go to the limit of what is possible!
Q. Who are some of your customers and what are some interesting applications your products have been integrated into?
You can see some very big names on our website under references. Of course, we serve only niches in these customers, but it shows that there is a lot of trust in our company as a partner to even very big enterprises.
To randomly pick some of the latest fancy applications we serve:
- Our power amplifiers serve critical telecom infrastructures in road and train tunnels all over the world through our customer Strabag ISS.
- Our RF front-end module products will be used in the “5G netmobil” project together with the SDR system of the reputed Heinrich-Hertz Institute in Berlin to do realistic trials of vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
- And our RF routing products are in use at particle accelerators by the world-renowned Helmholtz Institute in multiple locations.
Q. Geographically where are your customers located. Do you expect this to change in the years to come?
Historically our customers were clearly in German-speaking countries, i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. However already a couple of years ago we delivered products even to Asia since some big customers have subsidiaries and our product reputation at the German home base has convinced the subsidiaries to pick up our products also in their location.
Recently we have invested quite a bit in the internationalization of our business. We have now customers on all continents and receive RFQ from all over the world. This is a very fascinating development phase for our company!
Q. Do you have a set of standard products or do you develop custom products for customers?
We clearly do both: standard products and custom development. One side is nurturing the other. New custom developments drive the technology and feed the innovations into the standard product domain. And standard products open the path to new customers who then become a customer of custom developed products.
On top, we have developed a modular RF system, which is kind of in between the two extremes. It allows addressing applications where the complexity is too high to use a standard box, but where the economics do not allow for a custom development project. The modules are a kind of macro-blocks, integrating sets of attenuators, sets of switches and so on. They are built in a rock-solid manner to be used in an industrial environment, where you want to avoid to have 100s of cables and little function blocks stitched together. We see them used in all the market segments where we are active.
Q. Can you tell us more about your HTOL RF Test Systems?
I love to. The HTOL RF product is what I call our “star product”. They represent the highest level of complexity and integration of our product. We are currently shipping the 4th generation of products.
The number of very small filter components in mobile phones is increasing every year, as new generations of technology and new bands are added to the mobile communication industry. The big manufacturers of these filters need to understand the lifetime of these components and assess the design in their reliability laboratories. Our HTOL RF systems are complete test systems for the lifetime of these filters.
They are impressive products: physically they represent a 19” rack tower of 2 m height. Electrically they generate 80 parallel RF signals, where each signal can be high power. We have systems, where every channel can deliver 20 W. The most powerful systems need 3 phase power supply, as they generate a total of 800 W of RF power. But what makes them so special and what also makes our value proposition: the power level of each individual signal is very accurate and very stable over time, it can be tuned to less than 0.2 dB of maximum deviation.
Typically the systems run 24/7 at customers, and no power drift or fluctuation is allowed over the entire test duration. We believe our systems are unique in their performance.
Q. What Becker RF products for the Telecommunications Sector are getting the most traction? Can you tell us more about these products?
In the telecom area, apart from the amplifiers, we see more and more traction with our modular RF system, which is in use in telecom test laboratory of major network operators and end-user equipment manufacturers.
It allows our customers to get quickly very solid lab equipment tuned to their needs and covers the complete frequency range for 5G FR1.
Q. Can you tell us more about your team and facility?
We are a very “local” company. Despite the fact that we are well connected to the major highway A3 in Germany and not too far from Frankfurt airport, we are in a very rural picturesque environment, with low population density. All of our employees live in the vicinity and most of them have their family roots not far away. This creates a very stable employment situation but also excellent teamwork. Some of our employees are even active locally in non-for-profit organizations like the fire brigade or first rescue teams, so there is a certain social responsibility culture as well. A number of employees have already started as students on internship, we try to develop talent for the company in this way.
The same can be said to our supply chain: we try to source in the vicinity as much as possible and we have very stable and long-term supplier relationships.
Our company building is recent, but our current growth may ask for an extension in the medium term. We have some laboratories and production rooms. We have our own assembly machine, which allows us to produce and develop in fast cycles according to demand. Especially in RF electronics, this is very valuable, as often a tweak of one or two components can make a great difference in performance.
Q. How does Becker RF differentiate itself from competitors in the industry?
In the type of business we are in, all that matters is the quality of our products and the reactivity to customer requests. We have a reputation as a reliable supplier of high-quality products at reasonable prices. We pride ourselves in having detailed datasheets, and products that keep all the promises made in the datasheet. Combine this with the flexibility and responsiveness of a very small company, you can imagine that customer knowing us will come back again and again.
Q. What is Becker RF's roadmap for the next five years?
We have to follow the industry’s megatrends:
- The amount of RF technology outside of integrated circuits overall is decreasing, so we have to become more digital as well, and we are working on building our competence in this area.
- The frequency bands move to higher and higher frequencies, we will be following that definitely.
Expect to see innovative RF systems from us!
